A Cathedral Story
Generally, I’m a big fan of the miniseries as a form, but I can’t quite make up my mind about Starz’s big summer attraction Pillars of the Earth. It’s based on a novel of the same name by Ken Follett, and it has all the bells and whistles I most easily succumb to in TV like this. It’s a costume drama set in the 12th century, it ostensibly follows both the growth and upheavals of several characters in a fictional English town as well as the birth of the architectural Gothic style, there’s romance, there’s a big secret about the royal lineage, there’s Ian McShane. And on the whole, I fall victim to the sweeping shots of the slowly rising cathedral, just as I am supposed to, along with anyone else who’s read David Macaulay’s Castle.
Part of the series’ fun is its expansive timeline, which allows for the slow and often impeded production of the cathedral and its surrounding town to be clipped into a highlight reel, skittering from one monarch to the next, letting the characters’ children grow up to be sexy stonemasons and wool merchants so that they can play out a sort of Cathedral: The Next Generation while the building continues steadily in the background. It would have to be this way, of course, because to follow a 12th century cathedral from its conception to what I can only assume will be its completion absolutely necessitates this type of narrative quicktime. In one installment, the building’s original architect describes his awareness of this problem to his sons, admitting he’ll never live to see the church finished, and saying sadly that he can only hope one of his sons will carry out his work. Unfortunately, the chosen son has some modern ideas about the feasibility of using stone rather than wood for the church vaults, and without enough planning for the additional weight the walls will need to support, he causes a major collapse that kills over seventy peasants gathered to witness the consecration.
Sexy peasants - it's like a Kate Beaton comic!
But hey, peasants are a dime a dozen in these stories (unless, of course, you happen to be the one peasant with a royal bloodline and an uncanny knack for carving gargoyles), and the cathedral project continues to roll along, despite constant threat of political obstacles, insufficient funding, or poor architectural planning. It’s a wonder the thing gets built at all, frankly, given that the two quarrelling brothers seem to manage to pull the whole thing to the ground one afternoon just by running around the scaffolding and knocking over the occasional bucket as they throw punches.
The installments skip from battles and setbacks to marriages and victories with hardly a pause, and it’s worth noting that although the first installment gives some specific dates so that we can appreciate a jump in time from one decade to another, it quickly abandons this rigidity and lets the years roll by unmarked. All of this is fine, and perfectly pleasant for the swashbuckling costume drama type, but if you think about it too closely, things start to look strange. How is it, for example, that a friar who approves the cathedral plans in the beginning of the project is able to look exactly the same long into the future, when the cathedral begins to rise unsteadily over the town? It’s not just one long-lived man of the cloth, either. While the church grows in the background and the town shifts from a podunk backwater to a market destination with its own wool fair, all of the heroes and villains remain suspiciously hale and hearty for a time when surely someone would be dying from an infected tooth or malnutrition.
This is the most frustrating thing about Pillars of the Earth. The series’ primary focus is on change – a developing town, a growing cathedral, upheaval in the monarchy, a new artistic aesthetic (now the arches are pointed!) – but the characters remain oddly static. Their unlikely but perhaps forgivable longevity is coupled with an immunity to the transformation that has taken over their world, and everyone moves through time with weird clockwork motion.
It’s easy to forget the characters’ simplicity inside the muddy peasants’ huts and stonemasons’ workrooms, and the sight of Ian McShane in a bishop’s robes flagellating himself as he apologizes to God for committing such dastardly sins is nearly enough to distract from the fact that he did the exact same thing two installments earlier. But this sort of silliness is what will keep Pillars of the Earth in the class of entertaining period piece and prevent it from ever building anything quite as impressive as its own cathedral.